ghosts.” I watched the little kitty turn the corner as an idea popped into my head. “Lucy! Wait, please.”
The slender, white feline sighed as she stopped.
“Lucy?” I asked.
She didn’t look my way. As she stared off into the distance, I waited for her to acknowledge me.
“Uhmmm.” I glanced back at Olivia, Drew, and Sam in time to see Wade’s truck turn up the driveway, hauling the rental trailer. I wasn’t sure what had taken them so long to get here. And where was Wade now that the sun was out? But I had a question to ask Lucy. “Hey,” I called. “Snobby cat?”
She sat on her haunches and licked her front paw. “Yes?”
“You can see ghosts, right?” I scrambled forward and dropped to my knees in front of her. “You can see me?”
She sighed, which came out a bit hiss-like, and finally looked at me. “Yeah? So?”
“Have you seen a blonde woman? She’d look younger than me. It’s my mother. She died when I was a kid.”
Instead of answering me, she bowed her head and then proceeded to hack up a hairball. It was gross and disturbing.
She sniffed the brown ball disdainfully, then got to her feet. “No. I haven’t seen a blonde ghost. Are we done?” Without waiting for me to reply, she sauntered away.
“Argh,” I muttered. I couldn’t follow her, not when Wallie was parking the truck right by the front door.
Owen and Alfred came out the front door, smiling at Wallie and Zoey, but then the four of us turned and walked closer. When the rest of our family noticed us, their collective jaws dropped.
Larry came hurrying out of the house, his gaze glued to the little tiger ghoul. “Zoey! I’m so happy you’re ba—” At that point, he also noticed us. “Ah, my holy shit. Are you guys dead?”
We all rushed forward, denying his question. “No,” I called. “We’re just stuck here!”
Wallie ran full tilt around the truck. “Mom, what happened?” He looked panicked.
“Don’t worry,” I said as I rushed toward my son. “I’m not dead, I swear!”
“Then what’s going on?” Zoey asked. Larry had descended the stairs and they held hands as they walked toward us with Owen to get the whole story.
“Where is Wade?” I asked. “And what took you guys so long to get here?”
Wallie shook his head. “No, no. You guys first.”
“Ah, yeah, we somehow got on this ghost train,” Drew said. “And we’re still stuck on the ghostly plane.”
I very carefully didn’t look at Drew, but Olivia noticed me as I purposefully didn’t notice Drew. Her eyes narrowed. I rushed forward and grabbed Wallie’s arm. “Where is Wade?” I asked, pushing the subject of how we got into the ghost world to the side.
“We got a flat,” Wallie said. He pointed to the truck. “That’s the spare. Full-size spare, luckily. But it put us behind. When the sky started to lighten, we were still a good hour away, so we put Wade in the trailer. He’s under a blanket and out cold. We’ll have to leave him there until it gets dark.”
That was unfortunate. Poor Wade. He was going to wake with a stiff neck.
Chortling, I got my own inner joke. Stiff. Cause he was dead. As a vampire. I was a hoot.
“Come on in the house,” Owen said. “Alfred made breakfast.”
Olivia and I exchanged a glance. “Can we even eat?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We can try. But I doubt it.”
We traipsed into the house. It was nice to be home, but everything was still so subdued. Like looking at it all through a smokescreen. I wanted to actually be home. To go to bed for like a week in my Shipton bed. In Winston, as weird as that sounded.
“Okay, so what’s the plan for Wade?” I asked. “Where can we put him?” We’d pretty much run out of rooms.
“I guess I’ll give up my office,” I said. I hated to do that. The only way I got anything written was to lock myself in there and put on music and completely ignore the rest of the insanity I called home.
“No, Mom, you can’t do that,” Wallie said. “I’ll just give him my room. I’m not here all the time, anyway.”
We sat for a minute as Olivia, and I tried to pick up cups of tea Alfred had set in front of each of us.
Didn’t work.
With a sigh of exasperation and a grumble from my stomach, I gave up and sat back. “I want to echo Drew’s earlier question. How can